From Kirkus Reviews
There is some irony in the fact that Benson, the creator of everything from plays to sober biographies, is best remembered for his series of ``Lucia'' novels, delicious satires of the pretensions and foibles of provincial middle-class life in Britain in the 1920s and '30s. Still, given Benson's droll send-ups of the bitter battles waged by matrons desperate to live out their fantastical versions of upper-class elegance and wit, and his shrewd readings of the ways in which our longings can make us both bizarre and sometimes appealing, it's very likely an irony he would have savored. His six novels chronicling the rise and fall and rise ad infinitum of Mrs. Emmeline Lucas of Riseholm are now being reissued as trade paperbacks. Queen Lucia, the first in the series, follows Mrs. Lucas (Lucia to her most intimate friends) through a lengthy and often hilarious campaign to derail the career of a would-be rival to the throne of cultural arbiter. The plot, however, is less important than the pratfalls. The six Lucia novels form a kind of epic portrait of striving gone mod, and it's good to have them appearing once again. --
Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
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Product Description
Queen Lucia is a humorous delightful book. E F Benson was a 19th century English biographer, novelist, short story writer, and memoirist. Benson wrote several ghost stories. His Mapp and Lucia series is his best known work. Lucia's supremacy as the social and cultural queen of an English village is challenged when one friend discovers an Indian guru and begins yoga lessons. Olga a beautiful diva comes to challenge Lucia's rule over the gentry of Riseholme. Lucia's ego is challenged by the guru who is a fraud and her Italian which is also fraudulent.
